One year after the release of my album Ionio, and after listening to it many times in different situations, I started to realise that this work had brought up new questions in my mind.

Maybe these questions came up because, for the first time, I had created a complete work—an album, a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Or maybe it’s only when something is finished and presented as a whole that it can create questions.

So, what are these questions?

Why did I create this work—or rather, why was this work created at that specific moment?

If I think back to how I was feeling on the day of the recording, I would say that Ionio was the last thing I expected to come out of that day.

What happened before I walked down the basement stairs of Zoodochou Pigis street in Exarcheia, Athens had left me very frustrated. The reason probably doesn’t matter to the reader, but for the sake of documenting it in my personal journal: I had just taken my motorbike from the repair shop, and shortly after, it broke down again. I had to call for road assistance and wait in the city centre until they arrived. It took over an hour. It was very hot, and I was close to being late because the whole thing had taken so long.

The idea that my sound engineer, Dimitris Staikopoulos, and I had was to create a sound environment that I would enter and, from that moment on, improvise on the piano for an undefined amount of time.

We often feel the need to offer something new through our art. I’ve thought about this a lot, and honestly, there have been times when I’ve questioned whether this need is even necessary for art.

Why do we feel the need to change something? What pushes us to look for new ways, new ideas?

What is innovation, really? What is “different”? And why do we feel it has to exist?

Andrei Tarkovsky, in his book Sculpting in Time, is clear on this. He doesn’t believe that we create only for ourselves—art needs even the smallest response from someone else.

If that’s true (and I believe it is), then the need for something new may not just come from personal desire. Maybe it also comes from the feeling that what we’re making could matter to someone—even just one person.

Going back to the earlier thought and moving closer to the question, “Why is the different, the new, necessary in art?”—maybe the answer is simple.

Because it might be useful to someone.

In this session, the idea was to record the full internal world of the piano by placing the microphones in a way that would capture even the mechanical sounds—the noise of the hammer hitting the string to produce each note. Inside this new sound environment, I would sit at the upright piano (from which we had even removed the wooden covers so the sound could travel freely to the microphones) and compose in real time—despite my unsettled mental state.

When we talk about innovation in art, one thing that often comes up is how we react to the unknown.

When we try something for the first time, the unknown is always present. For example, when I started recording Ionio, I noticed a very strong sound in my headphones: the actual mechanism of the piano. The “tak tak” that happened every time I pressed a key and the hammer hit the string.

For the first time, it felt like I was playing not one, but two instruments: a percussion instrument and a string instrument. And what was even stranger was that when I lifted my fingers off the keys, the hammer, going back to its original position, made another percussive sound—slightly different from the first.

How do we deal with this kind of new reality, especially when we’re improvising and being recorded, and the composition is happening in real time?

In that moment, we’re inside a completely new condition. The strong percussive sound of each note—and the second percussive sound when the hammer resets—both affect the flow of the music and change everything.

A logical question someone might ask is:

“Why didn’t you stop the recording to get used to this new condition, to make the unknown more familiar, so you’d be more prepared?”

For some reason, I didn’t. In my view, improvisation in art—and its recording—is closer to real life conditions.

We can perfect a composition or a recording, spend time preparing everything, waiting for the right moment—or we can allow ourselves to face the unknown and still create something that has meaning.

Both states exist in life. There are things we prepare for so we’re ready when they come, and at the same time, there are unknown situations we face every day that we simply have to respond to.

And probably, even in the way we respond to the unknown, some form of preparation preexists—shaped by our life experiences and the way we’ve learned to adapt.